El Socium en el discurso literario: un acercamiento metodológico desde la semiótica de la cultura
- Autores: Federico López Terra
- Directores de la Tesis: José Luis García Barrientos (dir. tes.), Tomás Albaladejo (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2013
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Miguel Ángel Garrido Gallardo (presid.), Juan Carlos Gómez Alonso (secret.), Brígida Pastor Pastor (voc.), Peeter Torop (voc.), Justo Sotelo Navalpotro (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
- Resumen
Abstract Perhaps the best way to start an academic work is doing it from the very beginning, even when this beginning is not very academic in the strict sense of the word. Behind every academic work always lies some trigger, and since objectivity in cultural analysis is to a large extent a matter of visibility, we would like to start by stating clearly the interests and aims shaping this work.
Some years ago, when working on an article about Felisberto Hernández (López¿Terra, 2013), I discovered myself using his texts not with a literary interest, although they still can have some, but trying to access some cultural problems through them. After submitting the article, I realized I still was interested in the problem of the access to culture through different particular cultural phenomena. My main concern was not the result of the analysis but the procedure. I started thinking the work deserved to be revisited in a more systematic approach or, at least, in a less impressionistic one. Therefore, if I decided to continue working with literature as an integral part of culture, using it as an `alibi¿ to access cultural phenomenon and as a clue for discovering unexpected social meanings as I did, I should start by understanding how this particular relation is established.
Some years later, that is the aim of this work. Another opportunity to think about culture by reading literature and to try to understand how we operate when transforming these connections we make just by reading into a metadiscursive reflection. Thus, a work that discovers itself, to a large extent, as a result of a methodological problem becomes also a methodological curiosity. This is one of the reasons why the present work will swing between the essayistic and the theoretical¿methodological reflection, even though, given that they intend to establish a complementary relation, they should intermingle most of the time, fading into one other.
Pursuing this purpose, it will be attempted to draw, as clear as possible, a methodology that may result in the particular essay which, in turn and dialectically, would help in revisiting the methodology previously proposed.
In the following pages we will attempt to draw a conceptual map of the main problems of this work, from the theoretical background to principles governing the selection of the corpus as well as the way it should be understood and used methodologically.
Although because of Plato¿s notion of art as three times removed from truth it was stated many times that literature as a fictional discourse was not suitable to analyse reality ¿in this case, culture¿, we will stand up for exactly the opposite idea.
Literature presents, from our point of view, important advantages on the study of cultural phenomena and dynamics in social life. First of all as being constructed with linguistic material it uses the most important code in human life. The linguistic code is the essence of human existence as symbolic beings. Besides, it is the most complex communicational system and, as a result, the possibilities of expression are potentially unlimited.
If we understand culture as a sum of languages (symbolic systems of any kind) that orientates human behaviour, it would not be wrong considering that natural languages ¿as the most complex symbolic systems in culture¿ are a privileged channel to access the study of a particular mental organization of the world in constant restructuring. Indeed, when Lotman (1978: 20) stated that ¿[...] human consciousness is a linguistic consciousness [...]¿, he was bringing up the importance of natural languages in the organization of the human beings¿ symbolic world even when it is not an exclusive prerogative of natural languages as symbolic systems. Being human consciousness a linguistic consciousness, through language we will access a privileged means of human signification.
Being the most complex symbolic system it has more possibilities of leaving behind itself traces of social interaction at different levels.
Although some connection could be found between the previous statements and some principles of linguistic relativism (Sapir, 1973; Whorf, 1978 and subsequent reformulations), the semiotic perspective assumed in this work, related to semiotics of culture, has very few points of coincidence that could be interpreted, in any case, as related to the so¿called weak hypothesis. This work does not ascribe to any cognitive theory on human language since its main interest lies in the social functioning of the linguistic code and the relations that, by means of this social level of codification, establish with reality and which are variable during one single human being¿s life and, consequently, subsequent to all cognitive discussion.
As for the previous assumption, that language leaves traces of social exchange behind itself, we will mainly work on the functional linguistic model proposed by M. A. K. Halliday (1978 [1982]) as one of the most important developers of the study of what he called `social semiotics¿ in natural languages. This model is doubly useful; in the first place, because his functional approach is perfectly coherent with the methodology we are trying to develop and, secondly, because his premises on the conception of social language fit within the semiotic framework of cultural semiotics and textualism. Therefore, we will discuss the main arguments on the understanding of the structure of language and how social traces should be tracked. Then, we will adjust this conception to the particular understanding of the literary system and try to explain some basic features of it by means of the Hallidayan understanding of language.
However, there is still the problem of the literary system itself, and the way in which its particularities affect the procedures of meaning generation.
As a linguistic code¿based system, literature has some particularities that distinguish it from other linguistic systems, especially from current speech as the paradigmatic use of natural languages.
Understanding literature as artistic written texts, we first face one disadvantage for the purposes of our work in relation with oral speech. As different modes of natural languages (Ong, 1987), written texts are highly codified and much more conservative in comparison with spontaneity and variation that can be appreciated in oral speech. That means that with respect to the use of live speech, literature may effectively be considered less useful to testify cultural dynamics. This issue should be born in mind in order not to overestimate the importance of some linguistic variations in relation with everyday uses.
However, artistic written texts are the sole texts capable of violating the norm, even when following these strict rules of codification we mentioned above. On the other hand, it is mainly this capacity of breaking the normal uses of language including referentiality and creating fictional worlds what is seen as a disadvantage this material entails for the study of cultural life. Artistic texts do not reflect the `real world¿. However, the fact that they do not do it in referential terms does not mean they do not do it through different other mechanisms. Although, if someone is trying to use literary texts as historical documents we will have to agree with the premise above.
The potentiality of literary texts is `somewhere else¿. By violating normal uses of language they construct a complex meaning system. And this is the main clue: every time we face a complex meaning generating device there are many possibilities of finding traces of its social source. Let think in the more limited artistic text: narrative. If, on the one hand, typologically, syntactically or lexically written narrative may have some limitations, on the other hand, pragmatically and semantically they can establish multiple networks of meaning, much more than current speech.
In comparison with other written texts ¿scientific, legal, etc., for instance¿ artistic texts are less determined in the ways and modes of signification and, hence, more permeable to reveal diachronic variations and to track traces of synchronic mechanism of signification. That is why the entropy presented by these texts becomes especially attractive for the purposes of this work. (cf. Lotman, 1978: 39 ff).
Artistic text is also the sole text capable to present such a degree of polysemy, not just because it does not have a predetermined unique sense teleologically oriented but also because it makes use of multiple meaning procedures ¿some of them practically exclusive to it¿ to which should be added its capacity for combining and superposing them almost endlessly.
Besides, this procedure entails the possibility of creating a whole new system of codification within the limits of the own text. There are literary texts that can only be decoded if we assume the principle of self¿referentiality in them.
Of course, this prerogative does not manifest in absolute terms and each particular text, depending on its interests and aims will make use of it in different grades as observed by Jakobson (1960). Even when this meaning possibility can be taken to the limit, there must always remain some link with current speech, otherwise it would be something different from a linguistic code. Many times, especially in avant¿garde or experimental works, this link is mainly pragmatic: lacking of specific directives, the reader resorts to the hermeneutic resources s/he knows.
The last feature we want to point out has to do with this possibility for reflection literary works have. Opposed to normal speech (either written or oral) which main purpose is communication, artistic works can develop more the generative side of language to the detriment of the regulative one.
While current uses of natural languages are more attached to a communicative purpose and, then, are more conservative, literature has fewer requirements to fulfil at this particular respect, accentuating its dynamism, unsteadiness and changeability. By means of innovation, the internal rhythm of change accelerates in relation to other cultural manifestations: ¿Different languages have different times and different magnitude of cycles¿ (Lotman, 1984 [1996]: 31). In this case, artistic works dynamics seems to be especially pertinent to reflect short¿term displacements in culture.
When talking about a corpus as the comprehensive body of concrete research objects, there are some principles governing its existence. The first of them is derived from the fact that these objects move from their original place at the object¿level to become part ¿the starting point¿ of the metalevel. As objects they are a plural and heterogeneous reality, but, on the contrary, as research objects they become one single reality: the corpus in order to work as such should be homogenous. In this sense the importance of the frame is capital to deal either with the whole or the different parts of the material: [...] when speaking of text, Lotman had emphasized the importance of the beginning and the end, or the frame. [...] the text was a delimited whole and the possibility of delimiting, either natural or artificial, made it possible to speak about levels of material, the coherence and hierarchy of levels (Torop, 2009: xxxv).
This is the reason why we will now present our corpus and its main features as part of this particular metalevel draw in the precedent pages.
We already said we are going to work with literary works and we also explained why we believed literature is a privileged material to access cultural phenomena. Now is the time to explain which works are we going to work with and why.
From the literary world we are going to start by selecting narrative works. Since we explained above that narrative works were normally the most determined by language, it may seem contradictory using them for our purpose, especially if we were putting forward the importance of freedom in the literary system. However, narrative texts, in particular novels, present some interesting advantages. First of all, they are half¿way between both ends represented by current speech and self¿referentiality. In this sense, they contain traces of the referential function as well as of the poetic function. This allows us to discuss the problem of referentiality and mimesis which was capital in earlier studies on the relations between literature and society, and to expose our own viewpoint on this particular matter. Narrative works include characters, action and relations among them which is a fruitful ground to work on interpersonal relations, social interaction and meaning, and to prove or reject our hypothesis that the relevance given to this referential world as a mirror of social life has to be revisited. At the same time that we develop this side of the phenomenon, we still can explain the other end by exploring the poetic function which is also present.
Secondly, as our final aim is to reconstruct a piece of cultural memory which is mainly expressed in narrative terms, working on a narration is an easier way to access this memory. Narrative literary texts as narrations are an already tracked path or meta¿memory itself and, hence, a good device to falsify the hypotheses proposed by other units belonging to the same whole, or even in the comparative process if using more than one literary work.
In our case we are going to employ a tripartite corpus. Each of these parts is going to be represented by one main work even though we will be working in a wider frame given by the previous analysis of the literary life of the text as a unit.
The first group is composed by works of already canonical authors; the kind of works that are already selected by memory even before they are born. In this case we will be able to examine canonization as a metadiscursive stage of culture that can reveal traces on the meta¿level of memory, not just as a discourse but also as a compendium of requisites.
Camilo José Cela¿s Mazurca para dos muertos represents this group.
The second group is the one of literary works acknowledged by contemporary critique and the public. Works that find their own place in this period, that are consumed, integrated and recognized as part of the contemporary memory. In a way they represent an intermediate step between the already existent memory and the new one arising. They stand for the process of selection and its dynamics. Luna de Lobos of Julio Llamazares is the work selected for this group.
The third group is formed by mass¿consumed works which are normally known as best¿sellers. By their inclusion we try to take into consideration the liveliest active narrative of mass¿circulation, the most explosive side of the phenomenon. In this case we are going to be working with Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his La rosa de Alejandría as the paradigmatic work of this last group.
By these three variables we are trying to consider different sides of the phenomenon in order to better draw a conceptual narrative map of memory and cultural change. Each of them stands in a different way for the same explosive moment and, consequently, different faces of memory are represented. The dynamics they embody are different in each case, as well as the position in the literary life system and in the whole of culture, too.
Therefore, by means of dynamics and position we have three different manifestations of social interaction at different levels.
When talking about literary life, it is important to remember the openness of the material text and its dynamics as an integral part of the object. From a methodological point of view, this principle could be translated in Lotmanian terms as follows: ¿[...] the text that has been transmitted and the answer to that that has been received have to form, from a third point of view, a unique text [...]¿ (Lotman, 1984 [1996]).
This unicity may be functional and conceptual and, then, stand for the frame and common framework. The interpretative approach and the common metadiscourse are what ensure uniqueness. Each text is viewed as a variant of an upper invariant text, and this text in turn can be viewed as a variant of an even higher invariant text, and so on (Lotman, 1978: 27). Then, even when the empirical work might have started by looking at texts as isolate pieces, it is just after reaching a common comprehension of these pieces ¿and just now is when we have a research object¿ that we can move to the interpretative scheme.
Afterwards, while the object starts widening its own limits, the unicity moves to the group of common texts, then including the other two groups and finally presenting a common map of meaningful social relations in culture. This narrative scheme presents a network of social meaningful relations that is linked to semiosphere since from it can be discerned a certain matrix of meaning generation.
From the conviction that any method is nothing but a useful metalanguage and a mechanism of abstraction, it seems important to retain that its description of reality is just one metadiscourse as any other. The resultant map should not be understood as a model of an ideal system but rather as a sketch, one possible epistemological shortcut. As Eco (1976 [2000]: 135) remembered ¿[...] a global vision of the world, including the interrelation of its peripheric manifestations, is constantly changing¿ and it would be, hence, ¿an impossible operation¿. Sketches, maps and shortcuts, this is all we can aspire to.
Palabras clave: semiótica, sociosemiótica, sociología de la literatura, sociocrítica, literatura española, post-franquismo, transición, socium
